


Whys and Wherefores

by Iceflower



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Family, Gen, Mention of Hate Crime, Missing Scene, mention of suicide, possible homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 17:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3618117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iceflower/pseuds/Iceflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kieren's question plagues Steve, stirring up things he'd thought he safely shut away.  (Missing scene from SiE2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whys and Wherefores

**Author's Note:**

> So, here's my first contribution to the ITF fandom! Also, not BR or Brit-picked, so let me know if I went too far off the mark.

Why and Wherefore

By Iceflower

_“Why did you bury me?”_

 

 

Kieren's question spun through Steve's mind. And the manner of it, as if asking whether he wanted chips or mash! Why bury him, indeed! What was the lad thinking of? They were decent folk, after all. They gave their beloved dead proper rites and set them in the ground. They raised stark, polished markers to show the world where their lost treasure lay. On birthdays and death-days, they brought flowers and tears.

 

Well, _Sue_ had brought flowers, every day, for that first month. Jemima acted as if she ignored the existence of the cemetery with every kilogram of a teenager's smouldering rage, it would somehow undo what had gone so very wrong. As for himself...

 

He carried a clipping of Kier's obituary in his wallet, tucked behind a carefully trimmed picture, taken when his boy's smiles still bloomed with ease. (And how long had it gone on, the silence and the sadness? Before the Macey boy left? After? It had all crept in so slowly...) He'd done his share of standing over his son's dead body. Only so much a man, a father, could be asked to endure.

 

And then in December...

 

His palms slipped on the steering wheel, sweat slick. Instinctively, he clenched his fingers around the wheel. In the days...after...things kept sliding through his fingers, out of his grip. He'd been unable to hold a cup of tea to save his own soul. He'd kept dropping forks and spoons, and knives.... No. He couldn't touch knives. Easier to drink clear soup out of those adult sippy cups, eat the sarnies Sue fixed for him. Cheddar and pickle, sometimes beans on toast. Not that he'd been all that keen on food.

 

Pens, as well. All those pens and bits of paper that demanded a man read the worst over and over _(Immediate cause of death: Suicide whilst balance of mind disturbed. Exsanguination, due to sharp force trauma). “Sign here, here, and here, by the 'X' please, Mr. Walker, just your initials there. I understand this is a deeply sorrowful time for you and your family, Mr. Walker, but we need you to tell us the sort of arrangements you'd like for Kieren.”_

 

Sue, bless her, had stepped in and done what needed doing. She'd done all the talking with the men at the funeral home, at the hospital, done it all with dry eyes and a steady voice. All those bloody forms one had to fill out and correct and trot about to be witnessed and stamped, all in order to bring one's child home.

 

Home. A hole in the ground.

 

All those things to sort through, searching through every pocket in Kieren's clothing, the bits and pieces he kept in drawers and boxes—and what'd those stubs of candle been from?--his notebooks, sketchbooks, his paperbacks, the backs of envelopes, the sketches tacked up on the cork-board, behind canvases that lay about, even his shoes. He'd even gone through Jem's room, just to be thorough, and hadn't she screamed the roof down about that!

 

There'd be some sort of sign, surely? Some sort of clue, a dog-eared page in a book, a song on repeat, anything that might serve as an explanation. Kieren just wasn't the sort of boy to—to--

 

The wheel slid in his grip, jolting Steve out of his woolgathering. He corrected, almost too fast for safety on the narrow road. And wouldn't that be a thing, get himself into a smash-up on an empty road now, just when everything...

 

He checked his mirrors, then pulled over to the shoulder, setting his hazards. Steve gripped the steering wheel, wishing now he'd gotten that bit of cording wrapped around the wheel. Tom Kelly swore by it, but Tom Kelley were the sort to put ice spikes on trainers if he could manage it.

 

Steve closed his eyes and pressed back against the seat, trying to still the tremors in his arms. Not so near a thing, really. Just a bit of a slip. Just needed a moment to sort himself out. This road had always been chancy, but since the Rising, it were like riding a bicycle along a goat trail. Road repair didn't rate too highly when the dead came crawling up out of the ground. Made a man wary to put shovel to earth, it did. Never knew what might lie below. One heard stories. One feared.

 

Kieren'd given his word that he'd call if owt went awry, he reminded himself. Kieren's word could be trusted, a terrible, terrible liar, his lad, even when his life depended on it. So earnest, so easily read, except when it mattered. He just didn't like to disturb people, so those who loved him just turned their eyes away and gave him his space. That business with the Macey boy, for example. It'd sort itself, Sue had told him.

 

Kieren'd given his word that he'd call if owt went awry. And Kieren never lied, not even when he'd gotten closer than seemly to the Macey boy, or snuck out like what passed for a bit of a lad in Roarton. He just never—never--

 

Steve closed his eyes and let his head drop to his hands, still clenched around the wheel.

 

_“Why did you bury me?”_

_Oh, lad, it was you who left us, and look at what happened when we let you go beyond our reach?_

 

The night before the funeral, he'd paced his darkened bedroom, venturing out into the hall when the wall pressed too close. He'd stopped outside Jemima's room, straining his ears for the sound of movement. Kieren's door was shut fast, though he'd no notion of who'd done it. He'd burned the clothes he'd worn that night. Burned all the ones that looked like them too, a wild, dry-eyed purging that lasted two smoke-filled nights, standing over the firepit. Ken Burton, still raw from his own bereavement, had brought him bottles of brown ale, sharing sarnies, alcohol, and silence. He hadn't even thought to look back at the house, to see who might be watching.

 

How could he have put his precious boy in the fire? How could he have burned him, his child, his first-born, his son--as if he were something to rake into a pit with the neighbourhood garbage? Weren't at all natural.

 

Kieren-- His son, his boy, so heavy in his arms, how had he gotten so heavy? Always a scrap of a boy, slim as a girl, how could he drag at Steve's arms that way? How could the weight of his absence drag at his heart and mind? Oh, Jesus, no man should see his son's blood spattered and pooled on cold stone. No man should have it coat his hands, soak his cuffs, taste the raw iron of it on his tongue. No father should run to race the Reaper.

 

_The red handle of the knife lying in what first looked like a mud puddle, and how had mud gotten into a dry cave? Gotten all over the blade, too, and hadn't he taught Kieren proper respect for good tools? And that mud, the colour of southern clay, and it was all over his boy, his sweet, silent, too-still boy--_

 

He had no memory of what he'd done after that, if he'd carried Kieren home, if someone had found him and brought them to the nearest A&E. He couldn't remember if he'd called Sue, or if some faceless, efficient person in white had done so. His next reliable memory was sitting on Kieren's still-rumpled bed, in the room that smelled of paint and turps, staring into the open wardrobe while Sue asked his opinion on clothes.

 

The funeral...that, he remembered. Even the qualifier _'whilst balance of mind disturbed'_ \--hadn't swayed Vicar Oddie. No suicide would have his blessing. In the end, Councilman Lancaster had spoken kind words over the raw grave. All of Kieren's mates from school had come, said lovely things. His art teacher had wept. Janet Macey had slipped away from her husband in the confusion, touched Sue's arm, and said something too soft for Steve to hear. Jemima had torn herself from her mother's grip and stalked off, levelling a glare at the Maceys that ought've sent them flaring up like dry old wood soaked in petrol.

 

He remembered the after, in bits and pieces. The house, not empty, but not full, and never quiet, not with Jemima blasting that noise she called music, deaf to all of Sue's demands to _turn it down, Jemima, your father's trying to rest!_ Time healed, people told him, but the spiked metal ball in his chest never shifted. Life didn't care about his loss, though. Mortgage to pay, bills and food, upkeep on the house and the care, and Kieren's stone to pay for...

 

Steve opened his eyes and pressed back against the seat cushions, flexed his fingers. His palms itched, a deep, unreachable discomfort that no amount of lotions or scrubbing could ease. Like Jemima's tip-toeing, it wasn't something a doctor could fix. He'd scrubbed layers of skin off of his hands, needed to wear gloves like a child with spots. The doctors suggested pills, suggested talking, but seeing how well that had not worked with either of his children, Steve had shrugged the suggestions aside.

 

Instead, he spent his off-work time watching films, Hitchcock, _The Lavender Hill Mob_ , _Chariots of Fire_ , _The Italian Job_ , and marathons of _Fawlty Towers_. Sometimes, he'd even gotten up in the middle of the night to re-watch certain scenes. He re-watched them so often, Jem began shouting the dialogue from her room.

 

Then that stormy, windy night in December. They hadn't even been aware of what'd gone on in the dark until police lights painted the darkness with strobes of blue. He'd stood next to a shell-shocked Ken Burton, clutching Sue to him, watching as the three Roarton PCs strung up blue and white flagging tape around mounds of ash-coloured earth.

 

The quarantine sign went up later.

 

Vandalism, they'd thought at first, satanic cult perhaps. Then people began going missing, bodies found ravaged and mangled, news coming too late over the emergency station. And one of those open graves was Kieren's, and one of those being hunted by the Army was his own son.

 

His boy, whose very presence now, the sight and sound of him moving about the house, could seal up Steve's breath and steal away his speech.

 

_"Why bury me?”_

 

The answer lodged in his throat like uncooked dough, thick and lumpy, sticking to all of his insides. _Because I couldn't let go, son, and it were better to bury meself beside you that throw m'self to the flames. They'd have stopped me, you see. As I should have stopped you._

 

And that was the curse he'd carry all his days: that he'd seen the troubles of a stranger, but those of his own son had slipped away. He hadn't been able to protect Kieren the first time. His daughter had slipped away on a tide of fury. Could he do better this time?

 

He'd no use for Vicar Oldie's rants—shameful, he'd admit to that if pressed, his own mum had been High Church, and would have had words with her son about his disrespect of the vicar. But then the 'end times' had proved themselves to be just a bad time, no different that what his grab and her sisters had gone through in the War. A bad time, but they'd gone through it, and gotten Kieren back.

 

“I'm not a praying' man, you understand,” he said into the silence. “It's no disrespect to Ye self, just that I allus thought I'd best see to me own work before I go being a bother to others, you understand.”

 

Ahead of him, the road curved out of sight. No traffic this time of day, never was, even on a good day. After that storm--

 

 _Maggie Burton, dragged out of her bed in the dead of night, begging on her knees for her life._ Ken, held by that Kendal lad. Maggie, who'd brought his kids cookies, helped Sue with her garden, helped care for the children when the whole house came down with the flu. One of the HVF lads, laughing, like it were some out-take from an action move.

 

And he'd just watched, with his useless nail-studded cricket bat, clutching Sue who had her arms full of chainsaw. His own Jem, staring at the execution, tight-lipped and pale-faced. Watched, and not made a sound of protest, made not even the slightest move to save a woman they'd known for decades.

 

And in the house, hidden by the drapes, Kieren, watching it all play out as Steve had watched it play out every time he closed his eyes, until the call came from Norfolk.

 

_“I don't like closed in spaces!”_

 

Because they'd put their beautiful boy in a box, put him in the ground. Because they were decent Northern folk, with dignity. Dignity that didn't hold once one's child came tumbling out of a cupboard, hyperventilating-and why did he do that? He didn't need—what did Kieren need? He didn't know now, and he hadn't known then.

 

“Quite sure it's not my place to tell you how to order the world,” Steve said to his hands, still wrapped around the steering wheel. “It's all A-over-T now, you see, and no-one knows how to set it aright.. Don't know what to do. Surely I've not gone so wrong I should lose him twice?”

 

No answer, no fluttering dove, or any of those synchronized moments that layered films. No answer, just as no answers had come in the hours and days after finding Kieren. And maybe that was the truth, the thing he'd tried to cover up with chatter about films and paeans to his wife's cooking. Maybe that was what he was being asked to face, the brittle, desiccated quality of life and safety. And Steve knew himself well enough to know he'd blink, every time.

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: I'm assuming the Walkers are CoE. From my research, most modern Protestant sects will allow a suicide to receive formal funeral rites and be buried in a churchyard if not precisely sacred ground. Vicar Oddie, with his fire-and-brimstone approach, seems exactly the type to refuse the rites to a suicide, especially if there was any possible suggestion that victim might be....*gay!* Because he was a jerk that way.


End file.
